


of death and memories

by braggwood



Series: here comes the reaper [1]
Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter/Funhaus RPF
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Immortal Fake AH Crew, M/M, Past Character Death, minor angst tho don't worry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-09
Updated: 2017-03-09
Packaged: 2018-10-01 22:30:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10202189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/braggwood/pseuds/braggwood
Summary: jeremy remembers. matt helps.in which matt's the grim reaper and has a lot of explaining to do.





	

**Author's Note:**

> WOO BOY THIS GOT LONG but here it is, the reaper fic ive been working on for forever that i decide to scrap and rewrite in like 4 hours. it's a little sad at times but don't worry it'll all be good

Jeremy doesn’t particularly like killing. He’ll do it of course, it’s in the job description, but he doesn’t really enjoy it. It feels kinda nice to end a terrible person, but everything else is just background details, collateral damage. Going through the motions.

Jeremy steps back from the growing pool of blood and sighs. Another day, another hit.

He doesn’t know why everyone seems to think a hit squad could take down anyone from Fake AH, but they do. This is the third one on Jeremy in a month, and the body count just keeps getting higher.

 _Add five more to that_ , he thinks as he grabs one of the bodies and starts to pull.

He’s gotten four of the five corpses in various hiding spots around the empty park he’s currently in, and he’s about to grab the last one when he sees a figure by the tree line.

He freezes and puts his hand on his gun, waiting for them to run for it or call the police, but they don’t, just continues past Jeremy and the very obvious dead body he’s carrying to a dumpster where he dropped a previous corpse.

Jeremy starts dragging the corpse but keeps an eye on them, watching as they open the dumpster, pick something up and head over to the next spot just to do the same. They visit all four bodies before sitting on a bench. He watches them for a minute but they don't move, just check their watch occasionally.

Jeremy hesitantly drops the last body into a ditch and walks away, putting a good distance between him and it. Sure enough, the figure walks over, climbs down and comes back up, presumably with whatever they were looking for.

Weird, but not unheard of. Some groups have IDs or other important things on them; a few have retrievers for those items in case of death. But the odd thing is no one saw Jeremy kill these five, he specifically chose an abandoned park in a quiet part of town to take care of them in.   
Jeremy can’t really see the figure either, just a faint kinda human shaped smudge in the distance that moves like a person. It’s like his eyes refuse to focus on them.

Okay, so that’s weird. But Jeremy has stuff to do, and he has no time for mysteries today.

He won’t forget it though.

  
He sees them again. Once at a heist, standing outside the bank like it’s an average day, surrounded by cops. Once at a bad deal, sitting on a crate while bullets fly, and once in a funeral procession that he crossed paths with. They were walking along the cars with some sort of staff, one hand on the hearse.

Jeremy’s ready to go to a psychologist, because he must be crazy. It’s like he’s the only one who seems to know anything about this person. He’s pointed the figure out to the others before but no one sees them, he’s done research on strange figures, he’s tried to search for them himself and comes up with nothing.

The only thing he’s got is that they’re connected to death in someway. They’re always by a dead body, or soon to be dead body, and Jeremy holds onto that. He’s got a lead, a chance to prove to himself he’s not hallucinating. (He checked himself out anyways; he shows no signs of the illnesses associated with hallucinations.)

  
They’re here. All it took was one dead man in an old half built building to summon them, and carrying that body up here was a pain, but they’re here and that’s all Jeremy cares about. Now that they’re closer he can see more human shapes in the blur, and he thinks they’re wearing something red.

“Hey.” He calls out, voice friendly. He doesn’t want to scare them off. They seem to jump at the noise, head moving side to side before facing him. He waves, and they freeze.

“I don’t wanna hurt you. I just wanna know why you’re here, or why I can’t see you. Maybe what you are. Answers for any of those would be good.” Okay, so that got a little long. But he really does want answers.

The figure stares at him, or what he assumes is staring. The shape in the place where a head’s supposed to be is facing directly at him, so he’ll just say they’re staring.

“Hello? Can you hear me? Do you even speak English?” Fuck, he didn’t think about that. He just assumed the weird death smudge spoke English.

“I hear you.” _Jesus christ on a bike_ , was that their voice? Jeremy stares at them, still computing the mashup of noises that just came out of them and somehow translated to English in his head. It sounds like a whale and a lawnmower had a child that spoke Russian and Satan at the same time.

“Okay, first off, I might have shit my pants. Second off, can you answer my questions then?” They pause.

“..Maybe.” Jeremy frowns.

“Maybe? I killed a guy for a maybe?” The form shrugs. “Okay, fine then. What are you?”

“Pass.”

“Why are you here?”

“Pass.”

“Who are you?” They hesitate for a second, and Jeremy makes a mental note.

“..Pass.”

“Alright jackass, this is a two way street, you gotta answer something.” They shrug again.

“Why can’t I see you clearly?” That, they answer easily.

“Your eyes can’t comprehend me.” Jeremy frowns again.

“The fuck does that even mean? Don’t answer that. Why can’t others see you?”

“You know me, and they don’t.” Okay, _what_. Jeremy stares at them as his mind grinds to a halt. He’s pretty sure he doesn’t know an omnipresent ghost, but something about them does feels familiar, deep in his bones.

“I know you?” They nod.

“You do.”

“Who are you?” Jeremy asks again, more insistently.

“You already asked that.”

“Who are you?” They shift uncomfortably. They clearly know a lot of things he doesn't, but he’ll be damned if he’ll let them go without knowing who they are. He tries again.

“I can’t answer you.”

“Why not?”

“I just can’t.”

“Tell me.”

“Please stop.”

“ _Tell me_.” It comes out more desperate than he intended, but he has to know who this is. Something’s telling him it’s more important than he knows.  
The form wilts.

“Alright.” They say, suddenly tired. “Don’t freak out.”

Jeremy’s in the middle of a reply when their hand touches his and everything goes blank.

  
He’s somewhere...not here. He’s not where he was in Los Santos with the death blur, but he knows it’s not far. Everything feels close but not quite there; the penthouse, the city. He feels them, but he’s certain they're farther.

He’s in a blank space. There’s nothing around him, no color, no shapes, just blank. It feels like the black screen of a tv cutting to another channel, somewhere in the in between.

Jeremy blinks and he’s out of the blank space. He’s in an apartment, and something tells him he’s home in Boston. He looks around the room, trying to get a sense of anything; what he sees only confuses him more.

It’s old, all of it. The sparse decor, the furniture, the room itself; it’s all old, years before his time, and Jeremy has a strange sense of comfort, like he’s come home.  
Outside the window is the same thing. Classic cars, old timey buildings.

“It’s like I’m in the fifties,” he mutters to himself, and a piece of the puzzle falls into place. The fifties, he’s in the late fifties, 1957. Why the hell is he in the fifties?

Jeremy waits a few minutes, waiting for something to happen, and when nothing does he goes to explore the apartment. The small living area holds nothing of interest, and he goes to open a door, (something’s telling him do it, do it) only to gasp when he sees what’s inside.

Now, he’s no stranger to blood. He’s seen a lot in his life, and he’s seen a lot of crime scenes, usually caused by him. But even this made him wince.

Blood was everywhere. Floor, wall, ceiling, bed, if it was in the room, it had blood on it. He gingerly steps through the puddle, disregarding the fact he doesn’t leave footprints in favor of checking out the poor guy dead on the ground.  
As soon as Jeremy gets a good look of him the world glitches and he’s back in the in between.

He blinks back tears he didn’t realize were coming and sits down heavily on nothing. Who was that, and why is he crying over him?

“What the fuck is happening?” He whispers, and the world seems to murmur,

 _your truth_.

Time doesn’t pass regularly here, clearly, so he can’t even guess how long he sat there, staring at nothing while his mind slowly catches up to him. It’s like a big puzzle he lost the box to but he does it anyways, going by feel alone, and he takes a deep breath as it comes together.

Matt. His friend, possible boyfriend, he can’t tell. He doesn’t think old him knew either. He was alive and Jeremy was alive, in 1957, living together in Boston, doing petty crime for a buck.

Something happened. Old Jeremy didn’t know what, cause current Jeremy doesn’t know now. Old memories are given to Jeremy without a second thought, and he sees no reason for it to leave out something like that, so old Jeremy must not have known.

God, he didn’t know why his best friend was killed. Jeremy feels a rush of pity for - himself? He’s not sure if it counts as self pity or what, but he’s getting distracted.  
Matt dies. Old Jeremy tries to find out why. All he gets is a who, and even they didn’t give an answer as to why his best friend had to die.

It just keeps coming - sixties, seventies, eighties, he remembers all of it, remembers his long, long life. Every birthday of Matt’s spent in Boston, every June for all these years, until the memories stop at 2001.

Jeremy steps back from the figure, breathing ragged. He’s home, he can tell. Real home, not in whatever world he was in, real home. He’s back to reality.

“What,” he gasps, feeling tears drying on his cheeks, “the fuck was that?”

The figure looks mournful, pulling their arm back to their side.

“Your life. Your full life.” They say sadly. “No restrictions.”

Jeremy’s chest heaves, his heart beats wildly, his hands shake. His life? How is that his life? How is he even alive? The form answers before he can ask.

“You’re immortal, Jeremy.” They say gently. “You’ve lived a long time, but you couldn’t remember, ‘cause of me.”

He forces himself to a deep breath, covering his face with his hands. All those years he couldn’t remember, all those memories. All those people he knew. People he knew.

He slowly drops his hands. Staring right at the figure he says quietly,

“Matt?”

  
Suddenly, the blur’s gone. Jeremy blinks to make sure it’s really gone, and sure enough, he can clearly see the person in front of him.

He’s just like he remembers him, tall, thin, muted green eyes, but something’s off. His hair’s longer, touching his shoulders, and he’s still got his glasses, but he seems more weathered, like he’s seen some things he didn’t want to.

He’s wearing a fitted dark red suit with a black shirt, with no other colors. Just head to toe in red and black.

Matt looks at Jeremy and says,

“Surprise.”

He doesn’t know what to think, or what to do. What do you do when your dead crush you forgot gives you lifetimes worth of memories and tells you you’re immortal? Jeremy settles on ‘freak the hell out.’

“What the _fuck_ , Matt?! What the fuck was that? Why? What the fuck!” He throws another fuck in there for good measure as he paces the room with his hands waving everywhere. Matt doesn’t react, just watches him move.

"Who the fuck are you? What are you? Why couldn’t I remember you? _Why did I forget you_?” He yells, more for the sake of yelling than to make a point, but it gets the emotion across. Jeremy stomps up to Matt, stopping right in front of him and meeting his eyes.

“Why did I forget you?” He says again, quieter, feeling his anger melt away into hurt. Matt closes his eyes. “Why’d I forget you, of all people?” Jeremy lets the room settle into silence, and waits for his answer.

“Because you needed to.” Matt says eventually, voice choked. “I have a job, Jeremy. And my boss can’t let people remember me with a job this important.”

“What job? You’re dead, aren’t you?” Jeremy asks, confused. Matt nods.

“Yeah, I am. But my job is only available to dead people.” Okay, Jeremy’s getting fed up with the vague bullshit again, but he takes a deep breath instead.

“What job?” _What kind of job requires me to forget you?_

“I’m the Grim Reaper.” Fuck, okay, that was a good excuse.

“...Excuse me?” Jeremy blinks.

“I’m the reaper. I take souls to the afterlife.” Matt explains. “Every reaper’s existence is wiped from memory, so they can start working with a new life.” Jeremy nods slowly, trying to understand as best he could.

“Okay, but why’d I forget my life? I forgot decades.” He asks as his brow furrows. He lost more than half his life, just for a new start?

“You kept visiting my grave and refused to forget me in any way. You had to forget everything with me in it, so we had to take every year you visited me.” Matt almost smiles at the words. “You were dedicated to keeping me company.”

“Well, yeah. I love you.” Jeremy says easily, and freezes as soon as the words leave his mouth. Matt clears his throat, and, seeming to only notice their proximity then, steps back. Jeremy follows suit, and now there’s an appropriate friend distance between them. Jeremy misses his presence.

“So. Uh, yeah. I’m the reaper, you’re immortal. Have I answered your questions yet?” Matt says, clearly looking for a way out of the situation, and Jeremy shakes his head.

“Fuck no you haven’t. C’mon you dead prick, we’re getting drinks.”


End file.
